Scraps of Heaven

By Arnold Zable, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2004, 246 pages, paperback, $29.95. Reviewed by Mads Clausen in the June 2005 issue.

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Peopled with unforgettable characters and with writing as rich as the book's blackforest cake, Arnold Zable's Café Scheherazade was not only an impressive novel, but also a much deserved commercial success. By bringing the experiences of post-war Jewish immigrants to life, from the deluge of the Holocaust to the bustle of present-day cafés in Acland Street's 'avenue of old-world dreams', Zable created an exhilarating paean to the redemptive power of storytelling.

His most recent novel covers much of the same terrain, but where Café Scheherazade depicted the Jewish disapora's crossing of actual boundaries; Scraps of Heaven is rooted in one particular time and place and instead deals intimately with trying inner journeys. The former work centered on the café, but cast a wide net, narrating the perilous journeys that brought the diverse cast of characters to Melbourne, whereas Scraps of Heaven, as mentioned, unfolds on a much smaller scale. North Carlton's Curtin Square is both the setting of the book and, in many ways, also its foremost character. Despite the smaller scale, however, this is a more restless, roving narrative than Café Scheherazade, where Zable's interest in the art and craft of storytelling produced a much more traditional, if quite intricate, narrative structure.

The narrative unfolds during 1958 -- in four chapters entitled Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring. The daily life of twelve-year-old Josh Swerdlow reverberates with the cataclysmic events that his parents have lived through; events that have scarred Zofia and Romek Swerdlow ineradicably. Much of the narrative tracks Josh's restless wanderings through Carlton's streets and alleys, and the reader gradually comes to understand the reasons for the boy's peripatetic nature; his resolve to remain but a fleeting presence in the Swerdlow household. However, many of the book's most haunting passages do take place inside the house in Curtin Square, where Zofia edges ever closer to madness. As she slowly unravels, Romek and Josh stand by petrified, utterly incapable of relieving her suffering. While Zofia's unrelenting grief dominates the book, Romek also comes across as an essentially tragic figure. He is a poet, a man of words and dreams, but has to leave the house every morning -- suitcase of merchandise in hand -- to sell socks and stockings at Victoria Market. This is merely one in a series of commonplace, but nevertheless enabling acts of sacrifice and survival performed by these characters; a tradition of selflessness by his parents' generation that Zable pays homage to throughout. However, despite their dogged resolve to carve out an existence for themselves in Australia, Zofia and Romek both continue to pine for the ancestral homes they are removed from not only by time and distance, but also by the deluge of the Holocaust. Yet their lives are not the only ones stilled by horror, and their house in Curtin Square is merely one of many Carlton homes crippled by the long shadows of the Holocaust. Patrick White called this generation of immigrants the Burnt Ones, and damaged minds and souls are truly ever-present in Zable's narrative, if often inconspicuously so. Accordingly, rather than dominating the narrative, grief and horror surface fleetingly throughout the book; in faltering conversations, in flashes of absolute terror, recurring nightmares, and in glimpses of fading tattoos on forearms.

Zable's description of the almost unfathomable chasm between the immigrants and their 'Australian' children is also noteworthy. As the older generation still stands transfixed by the abyss, Josh and his contemporaries roam free, revelling in games, girls and music, either oblivious to their parents' suffering or utterly determined to forget it.

Throughout the book, Zable renders the mundane objects and events of everyday life with great precision, which makes all facets of life in Curtin Square come to life, not merely the immigrant experience, but also the clamour of pubs and the roar of football crowds. In tracing the minutia of 1950s life, Zable draws a persuasive and compelling picture of a community in transition, where working-class Australians are gradually replaced by successive waves of new arrivals, thereby creating a de facto multicultural community decades before the term meant anything in Australian discourse. The novel has a large cast of finely drawn characters, immigrants and native-born Australians alike, but, other than the Swerdlows, one character truly stands out. Having lapsed into madness after the deaths of his children, the homeless Holocaust survivor Bloomfield now serves as a guardian angel of sorts, a damaged sentinel keeping watch over the square.

Zable does have a nostalgic streak, but the overall atmosphere of the book is bitter-sweet rather than sentimental. It does display fondness for the place that finally offered these characters relative safety, if not affluence. In the book's opening sequence, Josh thinks the sound of the milkman depositing bottles by the door offers comfort and 'a sense of orderliness and regularity'. Zable's Carlton is a place that allowed a measure of hope, and while his characters are not healed or untroubled, they have found a place of refuge. That these immigrants were allowed to forge some kind of existence for themselves, even in a decade that was rife with scaremongering and conflict, only makes Zable's vocal criticism of current immigration policies that much more poignant. Not that the book has any illusions about the 1950s. Zable may indeed be an incurable nostalgic, but his work shows no sign of longing for that august Menzian decade. Instead, it emphasises both the lingering shadows of the war, where particularly Zofia's moments of madness are as bleak as can be imagined, and the often vexed reception the post-war immigrants received in Australia.

Considering Zable's own family history, this is a remarkably measured work; one that shines precisely because it is understated. Accordingly, like Zable's other works, Scraps of Heaven becomes a subtle, but insistent call for a degree of dignity and humanity that sadly appears to be missing not only in current political discourse, but often in society at large. It also suggests that the Australian experience is multifarious, that alternative narratives of belonging are as valid as the codified meta-narratives of national identity. My only criticism would be that that Scraps of Heaven, while clearly a wonderful work of fiction, does not quite measure up to Café Scheherazade's irresistible storytelling, dark intensity and gravity.

Citation

• Mads Clausen. 'Review: Scraps of Heaven by Arnold Zable' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• It's 1958 and Australia is becoming a different place. The Melbourne working-class suburb of Carlton is now home to many immigrant families trying to begin new lives and to make sense of the old. Romek and Zofia, liberated from the camps in Poland, work hard at the local market, but their love is in ruins. Bloomfield is kind and custodian of Curtain Square and is rarely absent from his post. The resplendent Valerio, stylish and soccer-mad, has just arrived from Italy. War veteran Mr Sommers sits alone on his verandah, while Yiddish actors gather at the barber's to reminisce and curse. Romek and Zofia's skinny twelve-year-old son Josh takes up boxing and becomes bewitched by the Swedish Girl. But Zofia is tormented, and as she falls further into madness, Josh wonders if she can ever be made whole again.
  
  Scraps of Heaven is a stunning evocation of a changing world, where optimism is tinged with sorrow at the raw memories of war. Arnold Zable's irresistable storytelling becomes a celebration of survival, a reminder that all lives are to be lived and that scraps of heavan can be found everywhere.

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